*The average annual working hours provided in the table are the average weekly hours provided by the International Labour Organization multiplied by 52.

So, for example, while employees in Turkey spend 2,256 hours a year at work, workers from the Netherlands work less than 1,627 hours per year.

Let’s take a closer look at how working hours differ across the world by going over:

On average, a full-time employee in an OECD country works 36 hours per week.

This translates to an average of 1,854 working hours per year, out of which workers in Austria spent the least amount of time at work (1,534 hours per year), whereas an average employee in Mexico spent 2,220 hours working in 2022.

On the other hand, an average full-time employee in the European Union works 36 hours per week (main job).

In 2022, the longest working hours were reported in Turkey — 43 hours per week, while employees spent the least time working in the Netherlands — 31 hours per week.

By EU labor law,, working hours are limited to 48 hours per week, including overtime (if permitted by national law, you may have an agreement with a staff member to work beyond the 48-hour limit).

On average, a full-time employee in the United Kingdom works 1,866 hours per year or 35.9 hours per week.

When it comes to Germany, a full-time employee works 1,783 hours per year or 34.3 hours per week on average.

A full-time employee in the United States works 1,892 hours per year, or 36.4 hours per week, which is slightly more than other OECD countries.

On average, employees from the US work around 10 hours per year more than workers from the EU.

According to the most recent US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, employees working in the mining and logging industry in the US worked the longest hours — 45.5 hours per week on average in April 2023.

On the other hand, leisure and hospitality workers in the US have the least working hours — 25.4 hours per week in April 2023.

Average annual working hours do not only vary from country to country, but they can also be different depending on the city of employment.

Here are some of the most recent annual working hours in 40 different cities across the world:

Employees from Copenhagen, for example, spend the least time at work compared to the rest of the mentioned cities — only 1,380 hours per year.

On the other hand, Singapore workers work almost twice as much — they spend 2,330 hours per year at work.

Workdays and weekends differ by country.

In most of the world, the workweek is from Monday to Friday. However, in Muslim-majority countries, the usual workweek is from Sunday to Thursday.

Also, some countries work six days per week, while some, such as Australia and Sweden for example, have adopted a 4-day workweek.

Most countries in the world have laws setting the maximum length of the workweek and the paid vacation minimum, except for the United States.

The US is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have legally mandated annual leave and does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.

European countries, on the other hand, mandate a minimum of at least 20 paid vacation days per year (some even go higher to 25 or even 30 or more days).

Australia and New Zealand require employers to grant at least 20 vacation days per year, and Canada and Japan mandate at least 10 paid days off.

In addition to mandated paid annual leave, workers also get paid time off for public holidays.

For instance, the FLSA does not require private US employers to offer paid holidays to their employees, but most of the rest of the world's developed countries offer at least 6 paid holidays per year (while some countries like Cambodia and Iran offer 27 paid holidays).

In the absence of government standards, 28 million Americans don’t have any vacation or paid holidays. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average US worker receives only about 10 days of paid vacation and about 6 paid holidays per year — less than the minimum legal standard set in the rest of the world's rich economies.

A longer working week does not necessarily result in higher levels of productivity.

For example, workers in Mexico have quite long annual shifts (2,220 hours/year), but their GDP per hour is among the lowest.

As productivity increases, working hours decrease. For example, employees in Ireland work 36 hours per week on average (1,872 hours/year), but their GDP per hour is the highest in the world.

However, productivity levels have not always been as high as today. In fact, productivity has been increasing exponentially for more than a century.

Therefore, an average worker today must work 11h per week to produce as much as the one working 40h per week in 1950.

But, fast productivity growth has not necessarily reduced work time.

Namely, even though overtime is legally regulated in most countries by a combination of laws, research has shown that one in ten employees worked an extra day of unpaid overtime every week in 2021.

However, due to long hours and a high burnout rate, workers across America demonstrated a 4.1% drop in productivity in 2022. This is the lowest drop ever since the US Bureau of Labor Statistics started measuring employee productivity in 1948.

The negative productivity trend continued in 2023 — the US workers’ productivity dropped by 2.7% in the first quarter of 2023.

Given that there’s a strong link between employee productivity, performance outcomes, and engagement, an increased number of actively disengaged employees (from 13% to 18%) could mean quiet quitting is on the rise.

Since quiet quitting involves employees completing their core tasks while refusing to sacrifice their private life to go above and beyond at work, a decline in productivity and output shouldn’t come as a surprise.

As most jobs require going the extra mile to collaborate with team members (especially in a remote or a hybrid setting), a productivity drop seems like a logical outcome of more than 50% of US employees embracing the quiet quitting phenomenon.

Even though working hours vary across countries, they have been exponentially decreasing over centuries in every corner of the world.

Compared to an average 1850s worker who used to work more than 3,000 hours per year, a 2023 employee spends 1,892 hours at work.

Still, although this change has increased employee productivity, the number of actively disengaged workers who decided to quit quietly has risen too.

Whether the quiet quitting trend will continue to rise, or we’ll soon witness a further decrease in working hours, remains to be seen in the years to come.

*The average working hours in this guide are the average weekly hours provided by the International Labour Organization multiplied by 52.